Chapter Three: Catalogs

In the fall of 2002, Jesse Jordan of Oceanside, New York, enrolled as a freshman
at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York. His major at RPI was
information technology. Though he is not a programmer, in October Jesse decided
to begin to tinker with search engine technology that was available on the RPI
network.

RPI is one of America’s foremost technological research institutions. It offers
degrees in fields ranging from architecture and engineering to information
sciences. More than 65 percent of its five thousand undergraduates finished in
the top 10 percent of their high school class. The school is thus a perfect mix
of talent and experience to imagine and then build, a generation for the network
age.

RPI’s computer network links students, faculty, and administration to one
another. It also links RPI to the Internet. Not everything available on the RPI
network is available on the Internet. But the network is designed to enable
students to get access to the Internet, as well as more intimate access to other
members of the RPI community.

Search engines are a measure of a network’s intimacy. Google brought the
Internet much closer to all of us by fantastically improving the quality of
search on the network. Specialty search engines can do this even better. The
idea of “intranet” search engines, search engines that search within the network
of a particular institution, is to provide users of that institution with better
access to material from that institution. Businesses do this all the time,
enabling employees to have access to material that people outside the business
can’t get. Universities do it as well.

These engines are enabled by the network technology itself. Microsoft, for
example, has a network file system that makes it very easy for search engines
tuned to that network to query the system for information about the publicly
(within that network) available content. Jesse’s search engine was built to take
advantage of this technology. It used Microsoft’s network file system to build
an index of all the files available within the RPI network.

Jesse’s wasn’t the first search engine built for the RPI network. Indeed, his
engine was a simple modification of engines that others had built. His single
most important improvement over those engines was to fix a bug within the
Microsoft file-sharing system that could cause a user’s computer to crash. With
the engines that existed before, if you tried to access a file through a Windows
browser that was on a computer that was off-line, your computer could crash.
Jesse modified the system a bit to fix that problem, by adding a button that a
user could click to see if the machine holding the file was still on-line.

Jesse’s engine went on-line in late October. Over the following six months, he
continued to tweak it to improve its functionality. By March, the system was
functioning quite well. Jesse had more than one million files in his directory,
including every type of content that might be on users’ computers.

Thus the index his search engine produced included pictures, which students
could use to put on their own Web sites; copies of notes or research; copies of
information pamphlets; movie clips that students might have created; university
brochures—basically anything that users of the RPI network made available in a
public folder of their computer.

But the index also included music files. In fact, one quarter of the files that
Jesse’s search engine listed were music files. But that means, of course, that
three quarters were not, and—so that this point is absolutely clear—Jesse did
nothing to induce people to put music files in their public folders. He did
nothing to target the search engine to these files. He was a kid tinkering with
a Google-like technology at a university where he was studying information
science, and hence, tinkering was the aim. Unlike Google, or Microsoft, for that
matter, he made no money from this tinkering; he was not connected to any
business that would make any money from this experiment. He was a kid tinkering
with technology in an environment where tinkering with technology was precisely
what he was supposed to do.

On April 3, 2003, Jesse was contacted by the dean of students at RPI. The dean
informed Jesse that the Recording Industry Association of America, the RIAA,
would be filing a lawsuit against him and three other students whom he didn’t
even know, two of them at other universities. A few hours later, Jesse was
served with papers from the suit. As he read these papers and watched the news
reports about them, he was increasingly astonished.

“It was absurd,” he told me. “I don’t think I did anything wrong. ... I don’t
think there’s anything wrong with the search engine that I ran or ... what I had
done to it. I mean, I hadn’t modified it in any way that promoted or enhanced
the work of pirates. I just modified the search engine in a way that would make
it easier to use”—again, a search engine, which Jesse had not himself built,
using the Windows file-sharing system, which Jesse had not himself built, to
enable members of the RPI community to get access to content, which Jesse had
not himself created or posted, and the vast majority of which had nothing to do
with music.

But the RIAA branded Jesse a pirate. They claimed he operated a network and had
therefore “willfully” violated copyright laws. They demanded that he pay them
the damages for his wrong. For cases of “willful infringement,” the Copyright
Act specifies something lawyers call “statutory damages.” These damages permit a
copyright owner to claim $150,000 per infringement. As the RIAA alleged more
than one hundred specific copyright infringements, they therefore demanded that
Jesse pay them at least $15,000,000.

Similar lawsuits were brought against three other students: one other student at
RPI, one at Michigan Technical University, and one at Princeton. Their
situations were similar to Jesse’s. Though each case was different in detail,
the bottom line in each was exactly the same: huge demands for “damages” that
the RIAA claimed it was entitled to. If you added up the claims, these four
lawsuits were asking courts in the United States to award the plaintiffs close
to $100 billion—six times the total profit of the film industry in 2001. [1]

Jesse called his parents. They were supportive but a bit frightened. An uncle
was a lawyer. He began negotiations with the RIAA. They demanded to know how
much money Jesse had. Jesse had saved $12,000 from summer jobs and other
employment. They demanded $12,000 to dismiss the case.

The RIAA wanted Jesse to admit to doing something wrong. He refused. They wanted
him to agree to an injunction that would essentially make it impossible for him
to work in many fields of technology for the rest of his life. He refused. They
made him understand that this process of being sued was not going to be
pleasant. (As Jesse’s father recounted to me, the chief lawyer on the case, Matt
Oppenheimer, told Jesse, “You don’t want to pay another visit to a dentist like
me.”) And throughout, the RIAA insisted it would not settle the case until it
took every penny Jesse had saved.

Jesse’s family was outraged at these claims. They wanted to fight. But Jesse’s
uncle worked to educate the family about the nature of the American legal
system. Jesse could fight the RIAA. He might even win. But the cost of fighting
a lawsuit like this, Jesse was told, would be at least $250,000. If he won, he
would not recover that money. If he won, he would have a piece of paper saying
he had won, and a piece of paper saying he and his family were bankrupt.

So Jesse faced a mafia-like choice: $250,000 and a chance at winning, or $12,000
and a settlement.

The recording industry insists this is a matter of law and morality. Let’s put
the law aside for a moment and think about the morality. Where is the morality
in a lawsuit like this? What is the virtue in scapegoatism? The RIAA is an
extraordinarily powerful lobby. The president of the RIAA is reported to make
more than $1 million a year. Artists, on the other hand, are not well paid. The
average recording artist makes $45,900. [2] There are plenty of ways for the
RIAA to affect and direct policy. So where is the morality in taking money from
a student for running a search engine? [3]

On June 23, Jesse wired his savings to the lawyer working for the RIAA. The case
against him was then dismissed. And with this, this kid who had tinkered a
computer into a $15 million lawsuit became an activist:

“I was definitely not an activist [before]. I never really meant to be an
activist. ... [But] I’ve been pushed into this. In no way did I ever foresee
anything like this, but I think it’s just completely absurd what the RIAA has
done.”

Jesse’s parents betray a certain pride in their reluctant activist. As his
father told me, Jesse “considers himself very conservative, and so do I. ...
He’s not a tree hugger. . . . I think it’s bizarre that they would pick on him.
But he wants to let people know that they’re sending the wrong message. And he
wants to correct the record.”